Misfits

Our Review

The UK’s superpowered delinquents: five young offenders doing community service get struck by a freak electrical storm and come out with powers that match their deepest insecurities — the guilty time-traveler, the shy mind-reader, the girl whose touch kills, the ignored boy gone invisible, and Nathan, the motormouth whose power is the show’s best joke and arrives late.

Seasons 1-2 are the golden run: crude, clever, and surprisingly moving about the care system, class, and being young and disposable in Britain. Robert Sheehan’s Nathan is one of the great comedy-drama performances of the era — a devoted slimeball whose one-liners paper over real damage. The show’s rules (powers equal psychological scars) give it thematic discipline. The cast turnover after season 2 drains it by seasons 4-5, but the early seasons are essential genre subversion: what if powers didn’t make you special, just stranger?

Verdict: Watch seasons 1-2, wave at 3, skip 4-5. The punk-rock X-Men.